Shifting Baselines extended through March 1st, 2013

The Santa Fe Art Institute has extended Shifting Baselines with installations by Cynthia Hooper and Hugh Pocock through March 1st, 2013. Here is a sneak peak of the exhibition:

Shifting Baselines: The NEW NORMAL

A Report from the residency and exhibition titled Shifting Baselines including artists' Cynthia Hooper and Hugh Pocock at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico, curated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts. Opens January 7th, 2013.


Shifting Baselines is my third show in the last year focused on water issues, and Cynthia Hooper has been in all of them. Actually, I also curated her video work in a show in 2010 titled EcoArchive in San Francisco. Needless to say, I think she is brilliant and is very informed about highly complicated political and economic issues around water distribution.  

Hooper captures human interventions with video, mostly agricultural, in the landscape with an epic style of a romantic landscape painter. Although her landscapes are very luscious, they are also filled with a montage of disruptions that can ironically be seen as poetic. And, she is also a talented painter who depicts very small realistic scenes with printed text on large sheets of watercolor paper to both inform her viewers visually and intellectually with her writings of the many layers of politics involved in water management.

I first met Hugh Pocock in 2004 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art where he created a salt evaporation garden in their project room that appeared like a laboratory setting for a scientist. It was the first ecological installation I had seen at a museum that was aesthetically intriguing, as well as interactive, and educational. 

Pocock works with materials such as water, dirt, wind, air in his performative installations.
For Shifting Baselines he decided to build on similar installations he's done in the past that address where water comes from and how it relates to our bodies, including a work he performed for the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore in 2009 titled myfoodmypoop. 

Since his arrival in New Mexico, Pocock has been collecting buckets of snow from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside of Santa Fe, which he then filters after it melts to make bottles of drinking water available for participants in the exhibition space.  -->


The great thing about this project is that as a curator it is the first time I have been invited to be in residence along with the artists as they create their work in the gallery before the exhibition opens.

To learn more about the Shifting Baselines residency and exhibition, please go to the Santa Fe Art Institute blog HERE. 

Cynthia Hooper

Hugh Pocock

          

Hello 2013!!!

http://whitneykrueger.typepad.com/enchantedlivingarts/page/21/

Amy Lipton and Patricia Watts of ecoartspace would like to wish you all a transformative 2013! Since 1999 we have worked with hundreds of artists to bring art and nature programming to both traditional and alternative venues across the globe. We have recently updated our 2011 and 2012 projects pages and are looking forward to upcoming programs this year. We will continue to interview artists for the ecoartspace video archive and have residency/exhibitions opening this winter including Shifting Baselines at the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico opening January 7th, and It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel fine) at Ramapo College, New Jersey opening January 30th. Also, this spring at the World Financial Center in conjunction with the Festival of Ideas and the New Museum Ideas City in New York City we will curate an outdoor shipping container project titled "Untapped Capital." More information on these shows coming soon!